Wild Britain is like a parallel world. The action goes on under our noses but much of it is unnoticed because it happens at night. To experience the sights, sounds, smells and excitement, you have to go out into the dark and meet wildlife on its own terms. You can watch natural history programmes on TV, you can even observe badgers and foxes in your garden on CCTV without leaving the comfort of your armchair, but there is something infinitely more life-enriching about being out on an autumn or winter's night with all your senses tingling.

This may take some getting used to: whether you're a child or an adult, you have to get over all those ghost stories. Standing at the edge of a wood in the dark, it's easy to spook yourself. It's not just your eyes that have to adapt to the darkness; your other senses and your mind do too. Yet scaring yourself can be a kind of refocusing, sharpening the edge of your perceptions.

We are, after all, not entirely alienated from nature. Our senses are still hitched to natural phenomena and are keenest at night. Hunter-gathering is part of being human, and even if we are not all foraging for wild food, we are still eager collectors of wild stimulants: the sights, sounds, smells, taste and feel of the natural world.

And this is a prime time for Britain's animals and those who want to observe them. Long after the farmers' crops are gathered in, the wild harvest of fruits and seeds continues into winter, attracting flies, hoverflies, wasps, beetles and butterflies by day, and mice, voles, badgers and moths at night. With them come predators such as bats and owls Find the food and you'll find the wildlife.

In Nocturnal wildlife spotting around the UK, we'll be looking at some of the creatures you may encounter if you pluck up your courage and head for the woods or fields. But if you have a garden, or access to one, many can also be seen and heard much closer to home. Take your cues from nature, and you'll have a ringside seat for everything from foxes to field mice.

Large mammals

You're probably already familiar with some of the animals that visit the average garden, such as birds, butterflies, squirrels and hedgehogs. You may find plants nibbled, discover weird poo or little marks in the lawn where something's been snouting, or items that have been mysteriously moved around the garden at night. Perhaps you suspect you have bigger visitors when you've gone to bed, such as foxes, badgers, even deer? If so, put some food out and see what takes up the invitation. A regular supply of food helps animals feel secure and they can become tolerant of people. Just remember that they're wild, not pets, and if they become dependent on you they won't cope with the harsh realities of the world out there.

There are prepared foods that you can buy for badgers, hedgehogs and foxes, but they will eat all sorts of meat, dog or cat food and kitchen scraps. (For goodness sake don't feed hedgehogs on the traditional bread and milk – they'll blow up.) Foxes and badgers also have a fondness for peanuts, cheese and fried bread. Deer (now surprisingly common in suburban and even urban areas), rabbits and hares may be responsible for nibbling your plants and can be attracted to the garden, especially on cold winter nights when everything is frozen, with chopped potatoes, carrots and turnips.

It may take animals a while to get used to the regular presence of food, but many will settle into a routine and come each night. They become accustomed to low levels of lighting but are less nervous if there is little or no lighting. One way to watch them behave naturally is to leave an upstairs light on and watch from a darkened room downstairs. With patience, and a halfway decent pair of binoculars, you will begin to recognise individual animals through the variations of features such as facial stripes on badgers, the white tag at the end of a fox's brush, the antler shapes of roe deer or nicks in the hare's ears.

Be warned: foxes may take up residence, excavating a den under the garden shed, ransacking the compost heap, fouling the lawn and annoying the neighbours. In the mating season in winter you may be woken by blood-curdling screams. However, there is something irresistibly dog-like about them, and they are a joy to watch.

Small mammals

You are likely to have other visitors that are just as fascinating but far less noticeable. The commonest of these small mammals is the brown, reddish-tinged wood mouse, with a tail as long as its body (it's also known as the long-tailed field mouse), which has found its way into urban areas but is most frequent near woods and scrub. Yellow-necked mice are larger, with a yellowish collar and bib, and are found in gardens in southern England and the Welsh borders. The house mouse, meanwhile, is greyish-brown with a scaly tail and high-pitched squeak. It's common in city centres.

Voles, such as the field vole, which is small, blunt and stocky with greyish brown and creamy grey fur, rounded ears and small eyes, and shrews, such as the common shrew, with its flexible snout, tiny ears and dark fur, favour larger gardens with good ground cover close to woods or rough grass. These small mammals have to hide in dense cover or they'll be eaten, so they are very shy and mainly nocturnal.

Putting up a small mammal feeding table is a great way to watch these animals from indoors. Place a small, low table below a window and make an enclosure around and above it from fine mesh (less than 1cm square) to keep out birds and, more importantly, cats. To let your visitors in, push a few pieces of pipe through the mesh. These should be no larger than 3-4cm in diameter in order to keep out rats (although these are fascinating to watch in their own right).

Small mammals can be lured in with wild bird seed, peanuts and castors – fly pupae available from fishing shops. Having cover such as dense shrubby plants around the feeder table will make the animals feel more secure, although bank voles – small stocky rodents with yellowish to brown fur, a white rump and a short, bushy-tipped tail – may turn up under the table but probably won't be seen on it.

A good field guide (see useful equipment box, below) will help you identify your visitors, but there are other ways to find out what lives in your garden. Some people like to catch small mammals in special humane traps such as Wellfield or Longworth traps – certainly not the plastic trip traps commonly available from pet shops, which cause distress and damage. If you don't fancy trapping, cheap and less invasive techniques are hair or footprint tubes, which are relatively simple to make (see box below for instructions).

Bats

Bats are remarkable animals, navigating not by sight but by echolocation, a kind of biological sonar. Their cries are too high-pitched to be heard by humans, but you may have seen them flitting around your home at dusk, as they commute to their feeding grounds. Some fly over a circuit of gardens for airborne insects, some snaffle up midges over ponds and streams, some go after dung beetles in pastures, some hunt for moths over flower-rich meadows, while others flicker along hedges gleaning flies and spiders from vegetation.

Bats need old buildings, caves or trees with holes to roost in during the day and hibernate in during winter. There are 17 British bat species, and all of them and their roosts are protected by law. If bats are in your house, they will leave droppings that are small black ovals like mouse droppings but crumble into a powder of disintegrated insects if crushed. You might find these in the loft around the chimney or gable ends.

The most common bat around British gardens is the pipistrelle bat, with a small body 3.5–5cm long, a wingspan of less than 30cm, short blunt ears, dark brown fur with paler undersides and a small glide membrane on the outside edge of the foot. They emerge 20 minutes after sunset and fly with a fast, jerky action, eating gnats and craneflies on the wing. They hibernate from November to March in groups.

To find out more about them, buy a bat detector (see useful equipment box, below). These handy gadgets are used to pick up the frequency of a bat's echolocation signals and so identify its species; some can be used for digital recording too. The Bat Conservation Trust produces a bat detector information pack, but suggests newcomers to bats go out with a local bat group to learn the ropes.

Moths

Gardens are also the place to discover the wonderful world of moths. Britain has around 2,500 recorded species, 10% of which are migrants from continental Europe and Africa. Their numbers fall as winter approaches, but if it's not too cold you could still find merveille du jour, green-brindled crescent, sprawler, brick, November moth and December moth. The best way to identify them is to collect them overnight with a trap that incorporates a bright light but will not burn them to a crisp.

When Mark Tunmore was 16 he was inspired to make his own moth trap from a mercury vapour lamp, a traffic cone and a dustbin. "I ran my moth trap made of junk on the flat roof of our house and each night I checked to see what was in it," he recalls. "On 23 October 1987 I caught a silver striped hawk moth, a stunning, very rare immigrant that had flown here from southern Europe or Africa." Tunmore is now the editor of Atropos, a magazine and website for moth, butterfly and dragonfly enthusiasts. "What this illustrates," he says, "is that no matter where you live, you can find spectacular moths. Migrant species travel in warm pockets of air and can turn up anywhere."

You can buy a moth trap for about £100, or find DIY instructions at atropos.info. Alternatively, lure moths into your garden with sugar traps (boil up and mix your own concoction of black treacle, sugar and water with a tot of rum and paint it at eye-level on a tree trunk or gate post) or wine ropes – thick absorbent string or rope soaked in cheap red wine, sugar and water hung on tree branches. Check your sugar trap or wine rope every couple of hours during the night with an ordinary torch and see what comes to feed and get a bit tipsy. They will fly off when they've sobered up.

Paul Evans is a naturalist, writer and broadcaster

How to make footprint and hair tubes

To find out which mammals are visiting your garden, the Mammal Society recommends animal-friendly footprint and hair tubes.

These tubes, the society says, can be made out of 4cm-diameter plastic overflow pipe from DIY shops. For footprint tubes, use 30cm lengths and place two ink pads a little way inside the ends of each tube. These pads can be made from 7cm x 4cm pieces of greaseproof paper, stapled on to a sheet of plain paper. Brush non-toxic poster paint mixed with an equal amount of vegetable oil on to the greaseproof paper. Place a chunk of peanut butter (crunchy, of course) halfway down the tubes and leave them in various parts of the garden for small mammals to walk through and leave the calligraphy of their footprints on the paper.

The hair tube, 10cm in length, also with a blob of peanut butter bait in the middle, has a slot at either end of the tube for a piece of sticky tape. Before long, this should have collected hairs from the back of a small mammal.

If you think your garden may be used by stoats, weasels or polecats, make a larger version of the hair tube. There are good tracking guides that will identify your results, such as Animal Tracks and Signs by Preben Bang (OUP). The Mammal Society (mammal.org.uk) can also provide information sheets and identification keys.

Useful equipment

Infra-red scopes will reveal a lot of what's going on in the dark, albeit in ghostly green. Prices start at £180, but if you can afford to splash out £900 or so on ex-military equipment, you can watch animal behaviour in incredible detail.

Red light will let you consult books, check for tracks and so on without damaging your night vision.

Bat detectors

A basic detector to listen to the click, warble and ticks of bats will set you back about £40 from Alana Ecology. The Bat Conservation Trust provides a bat detector information pack and a guide to choosing digital recorders.

If you're the practical type, atropos.info has instructions for making a cheap, easily transported trap. Or buy a mercury vapour-type trap for around £100 from lepidoptera suppliers such as Anglian Lepidopterist.

angleps.com

Remote cameras

If you'd rather not spend all night squinting through a viewfinder, you can always set up a camera that will be triggered by the breaking of an infra-red beam.

A camouflage sheet costs about £30 and a standard leaf-patterned camo dome hide, like a small tent, will set you back around £200. wildlifewatchingsupplies.co.uk

Field and tracking guides

Two useful guides are the Collins Field Guide to the Mammals of Britain and Europe by David MacDonald (published by Harper Collins) and the Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Paul Waring and Martin Townsend (British Wildlife Publishing). If you can't find these in bookshops, try online at the NHBS Environment Bookstore (nhbs.com). The Zoological Society of London (zsl.org) sells an animal tracking kit for seven-year-olds and above for £20. Identify moths and keep track of recent arrivals at atropos.info